Songs of Earth is Margreth Olin’s critically acclaimed nature documentary which is both an intimate and an eye-opening experience. The director’s own father takes us on a breathtaking existential journey through the seasons of the vast Norwegian landscapes.

Described as ‘The cinematic nature experience of the year.’ and ‘A magnificent existential journey.’ by CPH:DOX, the film is already collecting accolades and is Norway’s Oscar submission.

By employing a unique scoring process, Rebekka Karijord crafted a beautiful symbiotic relationship between the sounds of nature and those produced by instruments.

Let’s talk about Songs of Earth by Margreth Olin, with whom you have a long-standing collaboration. How did you get involved in this project?

Yeah, 15 years it is now actually. I think I’m one of the first people she tells her ideas to and it has been like that for many years. Before she starts running a manuscript and applying for funding and all that. I think she told me about this idea in 2019. It was funny because we had done a bunch of documentaries together and she was supposed to do this big fiction film in Norway and every time we talked about it, because I was going to work on it too, it was a lot of resistance like, ‘Oh, that’s a problem.’ ‘And that’s a problem.’ And then we were sitting, having this meeting about it and were like, ‘How are we going to solve that?’ She hadn’t started filming. But then she was like, ‘You know, I have another project I’m thinking about.’ and then she really lit up. And she told me about Songs of Earth. And I was like, ‘Well, now something’s happening in your eyes. This is what you should do.’

REBEKKA KARIJORD © KNUT BRY

And then she actually jumped off that other film and started working, not because of me, but because I think a lot of people said to her, ‘This is a really good idea.’ So she started developing Songs of Earth quite fast after that and then COVID happened. They were filming and I couldn’t go to Norway – I live in Sweden, but I’m Norwegian – and I couldn’t go there myself to record sounds so I was in very close touch with the amazing sound team who was up with hydrophones in the water and contact microphones trying to put them on the glacier surfaces. They had all these different techniques that we were exploring and then they sent them to me and we made this big library of sounds from the valley.

And then I started orchestrating those trying to figure out: How would the spruce sound? Which instrument is that? Is it a woodwind instrument? Is it a brass instrument? Is it a string instrument? Is it a voice? How would the glaciers sound?

How did you make these decisions? Did you look at technical aspects such as tuning or tonality, or more like the materials the instruments had to be made of?

Both, I would say. Definitely a tonal register thing too, but I think it was also more intuition, more like, ‘What could this be?’ Because I’d never heard it or worked like that before. And then I made quite a few scores, but then I took a break because I got this big American film, which was the opposite of this process. It was like five weeks and a 90-minute full orchestral score and Hollywood and super-fast and crazy and everything was like ‘Argh!’.

I was like, ‘How do I go back to this slow pace?’. They had started editing then and Margreth was like, ‘Maybe you should meditate for a month before you start writing.’ [laughing] So I started meditating, actually. I contacted a friend of mine who is a meditation teacher and I meditated probably for a month, six weeks, and then I was like, ‘Now I got to start working, I got to really get into this.’ When I opened it again, everything came really fast.

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Then I took in soloists and I let them look at the sounds. I had some string players in, I had some singers in, I had some woodwind players, and I let them look at the scores, listen to the sounds, and then they looked at the footage. And together we improvised around the scores and then a lot of things fell in place because the soloists came with their own interpretation, and their own feeling and meeting the material. They had totally new eyes and ears for it. So, for example, I thought that the glacier would be a viola, maybe, and I thought maybe it would be some sort of woodwind instrument. Nils Berg, the woodwind player, had like a big palette of woodwind instruments with him – everything from bass clarinets to different various flutes to different saxophones – and we tried everything, and I was like, ‘Nah, it’s not quite right.’. And then he said, ‘Oh, I have an idea!’. He took the Alto flute and took the mouthpiece off and he blew it like a bottle. And it had this super moaning kind of incontrollable tone. Which was perfect for the melting glacier like this almost human voice. It’s a wind sound and it’s out of pitch a bit – it has its own pitch.

The violinist, Hanna Ekström, has a folk background. I didn’t think I wanted to go folky because I’m very afraid of the national romantic aspect of this nature in Norway. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go there.’, but then she had this way of twisting a melody that I wrote in so they really helped me find it, and honestly, that’s a lot how I work. I have a few people that I really trust and take in and they make my music a thousand times better.

STILL FROM SONGS OF EARTH

Had you seen any visuals beforehand or did you just start working from the field recordings?

No, I started working from the field recordings, but then once I was done meditating and I sat down they had cuts, some excerpts of seasons. I think I had like a part of the glacier, a part of the summer, a part of the fall. But honestly, what was written in those two, three weeks, maybe, after the soloists had been here, it was basically what Margreth wanted to use. She didn’t want to change much. And so, it was very easy. But it’s always easy for me to work with her. It’s a lot of trust and I didn’t find this film hard to score. It was almost like I was collecting something that was already there, you know?

The film seems to be highly personal to the director. How did you manage to empathize on that level with Margreth in order to create the exact soundscape that she desired?

I know her very well. She’s a friend too and she has a way of reaching my heartstring when she talks about her films. It always kind of happens in the beginning when we talk about her projects, I can sit by the piano and she tells me her story and then stuff comes very fast to me. And usually, I write it down or I sketch something immediately, which is a result of a long work relationship and a friendship and wordless intuitive artistic connection, I would say. Once you find that with a director as a film composer, hold on to it, because those are the relationships that really build up your artistic life and your career, I think. I’m not saying that in a strategic way, I’m saying it in a very heartfelt way. They’re so precious, those relationships.

And then I think also for me it’s a very personal film too. I grew up in that landscape further North. I live in Sweden now. I have two small kids and I relate to, maybe not the father’s story so much, but the love story for nature.

STILL FROM SONGS OF EARTH

And I’ve worked a lot on climate projects in the last years. I’ve scored the film about Greta Thunberg and I have done a record called Complete Mountain Almanac with the Dessner siblings last year, which is also a cyclic work following a year: 12 songs, one per month, about climate change and sickness.

I felt very moved by the material and the whole idea. With some projects you can just feel, ‘Okay, this is going to be something really special.’. And, also, to get to do music to a film where there’s hardly any dialogue and the music is so important and it’s a small budget. It’s, I don’t know, a million euros budget film, but almost 10% is used on the music and just that. That’s a privilege and trust from the director to say, ‘Okay, which orchestra do you want to work with?’. And she was extremely respectful and so it’s been great.

How did you find the experience of working with the London Contemporary Orchestra?

They’re amazing. They’re so professional, oh my God! And working with Hugh Brunt was fantastic. He’s the conductor who also co-orchestrated with me and Thomas Eggensberger, who’s my assistant. They are just really intuitive and flexible, I would say, because it is a lot of that with film scoring. If you think about the film scoring orchestra compared to a classical orchestra, it’s way less flexible with the classical orchestra, of course. You have to prepare and the score actually has to be exactly like it’s written and it’s a different language but a lot of us film composers are not classical composers. We are some sort of a hybrid. I’ve studied composition and orchestration, but I’m not a classical composer in that regard. I know the language, but it’s a different kind of communication in the studio which can be challenging if the orchestra is a little rigid or the conductor is stiff.

But with LCO it just felt they’re so open to last-minute changes and we did some really beautiful things where I did a lot of extra recordings at the end of the day that I wanted to give to the sound designer. For example, the sound of stones underwater in the waterfall in the beginning of the film, where there is this very hollow kind of almost repetitive sound of a certain rock that the water goes into and it sounds like a loop. They did this plucking with that and then we spread it out so it became like a stereo thing with a Decca Tree miking and it became really beautiful, like it moves around and we were kind of in real time like, ‘Okay, go there.’, and then, ‘You go there.’, and then, “you take up the dynamic there.’, and, ‘What happens if you go closer there?’. It was really amazing, really fun.

Have you discovered any interesting techniques during this process that you hadn’t used before?

Oh God, yeah. It was like school for me. That was one of the big motivations I think for me with the score. I got a chance to refresh and investigate extended techniques, on strings especially. There were a lot of sounds around the double bass that I discovered. And there is the sound on the ice towards the end of the film where I went down with a zoom recorder – I lived by the ocean too – and I really filmed the ice when it’s breaking in the spring and it’s three dimensions. It’s like one is the water on the top sizzling, and then there’s the middle which is like a mid-range cracking, and then underneath there is this amazing sub sound and then we divided that up. So, the double basses did something where they switched the bow backwards and they ran the backside of the bow over the bridge. Also, a lot of bowing just on the wooden body of the double bass, toneless. So yeah, it was amazing. Super fun.

Have you discovered any interesting techniques during this process that you hadn’t used before?

I think the most challenging part with orchestral scores is always the transition from the demos to the finished pieces. The Dogma rule, if you can say that, that Margreth and I had with this film was that every sound should stem from nature. So, this should never be manmade music just coming out of nowhere. Everything has to really grow out of the nature sounds so there was a very close collaboration between me and the sound designer, Tormod Ringnes, where I sent him my sounds and he sent his sounds to me. And in the end, I can’t really tell what is instruments and what is field recordings because it’s become this sound poem.

I think that was also a challenge, to find that balance. It was quite tricky. And he came at the very end when we were mixing and we got the recordings back from London, and of course, it’s at Air Studios, it’s a lot of players, almost 40 string players. And we were like, ‘Okay, how do we integrate this new sound into the intimacy?’ And so, what we ended up doing was keeping a lot of the initial soloist recordings, actually, because of that. And so, it was a little bit of, ‘Should we go that far and go really big and symphonic?’. ‘Yes, but we also have to keep some of this intimacy, to not lose the closeness.’ And, it is a documentary also, even if it’s big and spectacular. It also is a little poem about her mom and dad. So that was the trickiest part, I think, finding that balance.

What can people learn from this film?

I think it’s very simple. It’s reminding us that we’re a part of this greater body, that we’re attacking. And if we take down that body, we’re taking down ourselves. And it’s a love story. It’s like a reminder to listen not only to nature but to yourself, too, to your instinct and your intuition and I think our instinct and our intuition tells us to not attack our own body, our own system. I think we’re wiser than that, just like animals, you know? But I think it is a reminder of what we are, what we’re made of, what our DNA with our cells are made of. Like those images of her father’s skin and the glacier, we’re all made out of the same stardust. It’s the same atoms and molecules and so I think that’s the biggest lesson from it. Remember what you are.

What exciting projects do you have coming up?

I am just finishing a Netflix drama series called Deliver Me, which is going to be airing this February or March, which is a beautiful, kind of dark drama series. And then I am scoring a Finnish-Swedish fiction film, which is set in the 30s up in Northern Sweden.

And then I have two other fiction films that are starting next fall. So, right now it’s a little break from documentaries, but I will always come back to that because my heart is there too, but I’m focusing on fiction films now for a while.

And I also just mixed a record with Roomful of Teeth, which is an American really awesome voice ensemble, which will come out next year. So, there’s a lot of nice things brewing.

Canneseries-winning composer Giorgio Giampà dialled in all the way from Guatemala a few weeks back to talk to us about his latest project, the TV series The Good Mothers. He waxed lyrical about the brilliant team behind the project, his strategy in scoring the British/Italian production, as well as his process of writing music for a multimedia project.

Adapted from Alex Perry’s eponymous novel, The Good Mothers is based on the true story of three women born into one of the deadliest and wealthiest mafia families in Italy – the ‘Ndrangheta. Despite the enormous risk they’re taking, the fearless women work together with the newly appointed female prosecutor to bring down the organization. It is the first time the mafia is portrayed entirely from the women’s perspective and Giorgio made great use of his arsenal of creative techniques in order to achieve the perfect contrast between the enslaved and the subjugators; the unheard and the omnipresent; the conspicuous and the hidden.

Let’s chat about The Good Mothers. I just finished binge-watching the entire series. Great editing, directing, music. It’s so good!

The editors involved were really, really great. Julian Jarrold is one of my favourite directors. He’s very elegant also. The other things that he did in the past are so so beautiful; I was a fan of Becoming Jane. And Elisa Amoruso, the other director, she is very good too. I think it was a very good combination and the people that they put together…that was a very good productive strategy.

I loved how the series preserves this European flair to it.

Yeah, I think that is very interesting when TV series try to be like a longer feature film. There are some examples around like, I Know This Much Is True from Derek Cianfrance or Chernobyl. It’s a very great use of getting more time. I come from the arthouse film side and so sometimes it’s great to see TV series that take their time, not like give you the cliffhanger and all the things all the time, you know?

GIORGIO GIAMPÀ @ CANNESERIES BY OLIVIERVIGERIE

How did you get to work on this project?

Someone [suggested] my name because they always consider different composers […] – there’s this kind of competition. And so, we had interviews and I proposed to Julian – that was the interviewing director – my vision of what the music should do. Because I always try to understand, in terms of narrative, what music can do.

The first question that I always ask is, ‘What music should do? Should it like, be a character telling a story? Should it be another layer in the script?’. And I started thinking about these women, that they basically cannot talk. So, their voice is hidden, is whispered, is lost in the small roads of the small villages in Calabria. And so, I started to say to him, ‘Where is it, this voice? It’s lost somewhere.’. So maybe we should use a lot of reverb and try to find some narrative, some achievement that music could do, basically. And I guess he liked this and then they said, ’Yes, okay, you’re gonna do it.’

Only the key moments are underscored in the series and there’s a huge contrast between the cues that underscore the mafia bad guys which are very dissonant, menacing, on low frequencies. And then you have all this melodic, beautiful, and delicate music for the women. Please talk to me about this contrast.

Well, another inspiration was trying to feel for a second, one super tiny, tiny part of what women feel basically. As a man, I will never manage to do that because what women go through almost every day in their life, on a scale of very complicated situations to lighter but still very tough situations… that is impossible for us to understand. But I think it’s a very good in exercise to try a little bit. To do that, evoking in ourselves moments in which we felt uncomfortable, for example, […] knowing that it’s not possible to do that 100% because we don’t live in that world, the world in which women live.

So, you have these more narrative parts, but you have also the function of music and one of the functions of music, obviously, in a project like this, is to enhance the menace, the threat that these men are for the women. So that’s the other face, more simple face, you know, it was done like 10,000 times before to just enhance the feeling.

And something that I already thought in the past, when doing this work, is considering how the mafia people work. They work by hiding themselves. Their work is successful if they are not noticed. But they are felt. So, it’s like, the music comes from under the ground or behind this [curtain]. And so, that probably was the thing, enhancing these faces. Sometimes feeling they are in a good position, but they were like, shooting rage and horrible feelings all the time. Which is basically the world for the women, because there are nice faces that are very violent without saying anything.

THE GOOD MOTHERS BERLINALE FESTIVAL POSTER

What was the most difficult scene or cue for you to score?

For TV series, I try to use a different strategy from the feature films. I try to make most of the music before. So, I worked on the script basically. And watching the dailies, which is the collection of the shots of the day. They put them on a website and I’m always watching them, so I learned about the director and I saw how they shoot. And I could start to feel what’s the movement of the camera, which is the rhythm. I did I think 75-80% of the music before so that they can edit with the music. So, you avoid having temp tracks – which is the great scary thing of our job and always a problem. And I rely a lot on the editors. Now they want to use the music too. Especially when you have great editors like this time, Simona Paggi, that was the editor for the first two episodes and did these two feature films that won the Academy Awards. She’s quite famous for the use of music the way she does. It was great to give her the possibility to use the music.

And then there were very complicated scenes in which we had to talk a lot to understand how to put the things together, but it was more music editing. In episode 2, there is a moment in which there’s a tarantella they display live in a very long scene and that, yes, was complicated, because music sometimes goes below the tarantella and then we had to match everything.

It sounds like you had plenty of time. It wasn’t a rushed project with a tight deadline.

No, because I start immediately. When they tell me, ‘Yes, you are going to do it.’ and I have the script, I have the dailies, I do it. So, they can work with the music and then there’s time to make more. For me, it works like a strategy. Some other people like to wait for the editing to be done. It’s more interesting also to sometimes not be linked in such a tough way to the image and more to the story. It can be a very good combination.

THE GOOD MOTHERS, STILL BERLINALE

So, the part that inspires you the most on a project is the story.

I think when making an audio-visual project – films, TV series, documentaries, etc. – the thing is that we are part of a narration over the storytelling. It’s like when children play games and you have to choose your role, like some child will be the princess, the other one will like be the dragon. And then you can decide to be the walls of the castle or the cloud that is going through. That’s the interesting part of my job for me. And so, I like to connect to the story. Clearly, we are not doing music for ourselves. So, I always ask from the beginning, ‘How is the film going to look like?’, ‘What lenses did you use for the camera? Is it a hand-held camera or not?’. I watch the dailies, so I see what they’re doing. I see if the camera moves faster or moves slow.

Making a film is thinking about everything, basically. Sometimes you focus on something, sometimes you focus on something else. But you have to go along with the storytelling. And I’m polytheistic in this case, so you can change all the time the way you want to act or the way you are going to work and that’s good because if not, we would have gone to work in a bank doing the same thing basically – with respect to the bankers.

Did you write any specific music that you really loved but didn’t make it into the series?

You know, I think everything made it to the series. Actually, I fought a lot to try to not have one [cue] that I like very much but I didn’t feel that it was right for the TV series. So, it was the opposite. And I was always saying, ‘Come on, it’s not working! This one is better for something else.’, etc.

STILL FROM THE GOOD MOTHERS

So, they ended up using it.

[laughing] Unfortunately, yes. But it was used in just one scene, and I have to say that in that scene, it works. But when I was with them, I was saying, ‘No, but we should turn off this music. It’s better to go without music.’. And they were always saying to me, ‘What a strange kind of composer you are that are asking to turn off music.’. There are some projects that need a lot of music. In this case, I felt that like silence was very interesting. I proposed to not put music on the end credits on episode three, for example, because I felt that it was very interesting to have silence after what happens in the end.

I think if you feel that your work is not to make music for yourself but it’s being part of storytelling, then you can live in peace if a work is not full of music.

As I understand it, you come from the same area where the action takes place.

I have roots from the south of Italy, from the region in which the TV series takes place and I remember one thing that I told to Julian, that that region is really great. It’s very underrated but the region is full of history, and it was part of the Magna Graecia; a lot of scientists and philosophers from the Magna Graecia times lived there. It’s a place in which you have a mountain, you can see two different seas when looking right and looking left, etc. It’s a region that is full of magic.

“Men should try to do an exercise about trying to feel – even if it’s not possible – but trying to feel what women feel.”

And I really think that we have to look really carefully for the backstory of the music. I think that we have to build the narrative role or the character of the music, working as actors do. I read the Stanislavski method because I wanted to understand how – and I really love the book. But it’s important to find backstories, even find things that you will not use, and maybe they will show up at one point. I felt that maybe there are some cues that could be connected to some Greek tragedies in the end. It was good to explore that side too.

Do you think that because you are familiar with the area that helped you picture the local culture better?

Surely, yes, of course, it can help, but I also think that you have to be able – and that was what Stanislavski was actually saying – to create a character even from a place that is very far from you and you never visited. He was talking about Polynesia in the book, like there will be one day someone asking you to act a Polynesian person and you’ve never been to Polynesia, but you have to be able to. How will you do? You have to study, and you have to feel. I work a lot in Mexico and I’m not Mexican. But still, you can study, and you can try to understand and then you can find the right way. Clearly, I spent a lot of time there and it helped, yes. But someone from Milano could have done it. [laughing] Or someone from London could have done it too. It’s just about studying a lot.

Did you learn anything about yourself while working on the series?

Wow… I don’t think I learned something about myself but it’s interesting what I told you before: men should try to do an exercise about trying to feel – even if it’s not possible – but trying to feel what women feel. Because that is so important. And so, that’s something that you have to do by trying to recall moments in which you’ve felt uncomfortable. Or, in this case, in which you felt that you couldn’t talk. And remember how it feels. And then [multiply] it by 1 million times, basically. So, I don’t know if I learned something but it’s a process that was intense. It’s a deep project.

STILL FROM THE GOOD MOTHERS

Do you think there are enough projects that talk about these important topics these days?

I think the situation is getting better, but we are very far from being equal by all points of view. There’s not enough representation for all the human groups that should be represented, that is sure. For example, I held a free workshop for female composers for some years because the numbers are very low. So, work should be more equal. It’s getting a little bit better, but we are still under a very high fever. Let’s put it like this. We need more paracetamol. It’s slow and it’s not acceptable to be so slow.

Do you have any exciting projects coming out soon?

I did an Italian feature film that is very interesting about a single gay man – it’s a true story – that fights to adopt. And it’s the first guy that is a single parent adopting and even more, a single gay man adopting. I don’t know if it’s still the only case in Italy, but it’s the first case.

And we just completed these days a Swedish feature film that is very beautiful, from Mika Gustafson. It’s our first feature and it’s very, very, very beautiful. I really, I really love the film and the director, she’s really great.

Belgian composer Hannes De Maeyer discusses his newest projects, the soundtracks to psychological thriller Noise and season 2 of crime procedural Professor T, how he kept himself busy during the pandemic, as well as his upcoming projects.

It’s been almost three years since we had our last chat. It looks like you’ve been very busy. What’s new?

On the personal side, my daughter was born at the beginning of 2020. Three months after she was born, the lockdown was announced. So, for us, it was kind of like a present. We could spend so much time together with our little new family. We were kept in our bubble as everybody but we had a newborn so it was pretty special and precious.

Of course, professionally, the whole world was like, ‘What’s happening?’. Everything stopped for a minute, but I was lucky enough. I think in May I started working on an animation series called Ninja Express. The animators could just continue animating at home on their computers so that the project was not delayed. In the UK it’s on [CBBC]. That was a really nice project. Lots of work, obviously, it’s like 53 episodes of 10 minutes. Every week we had to deliver one. I think it took like a year and a half.

I also worked on the sequel of Immenhof [Immenhof – Das Abenteuer eines Sommers].

And also, on Rebel by Adil [El Arbi] and Bilall [Fallah]. Which is a big project. It’s pretty ambitious. It also needed songs to be composed before the shoot so it’s like a kind of a musical, but not really a musical. It has songs but it’s mostly rap or Arabic flavours. I worked together on the rap lyrics with the main actor, Aboubakr Bensaihi. For the more lyrical songs, I also worked together with Oum, who is a famous singer from Morocco who lives in France. And that was amazing. Her voice is so nice. And the way she approaches songs, the lyrics, it’s so poetic. I composed the songs for that movie and then they went on to do the shooting. And then after the movie was finished in the editing room I also had to make, of course, the other score. It’s also with choreography and stuff so it’s an amazing project.

STILL FROM PROFESSOR T

And then, Professor T, which is also pretty exciting because I worked on the Belgian version – I think sevenish years ago. It was really nice to revisit that world. But on the other hand, I couldn’t use the music I did for the first one, obviously. It’s a different director; a different actor; it’s in English; it’s not in Belgium, but in Cambridge. So, it had a little bit of a different vibe; a little bit more cinematic, I guess.

To start on Professor T was sometimes, in the beginning, a little bit daunting because I knew the world of Professor T, the Belgian version, so well. So, it was like a puzzle to solve: ‘How can I approach using the same fabric but adding something new to the table?’. And pretty soon I was really inspired by the talks with the director, Dries Vos. But also, when I saw the images coming from the shoots, I could follow the scenes that they recorded that day. I made like 10 or 11 themes. I sent them to the director just to try. And I think almost all those ideas have become a theme in the show. So that was really cool that I was pretty fast on the right track with those themes.

Season 2 came out recently. Professor Tempest is working more closely with the police, and he is taking steps towards growing. And so, he reluctantly goes to see a therapist. As he grows, how does the music evolve in this season?

The music in the second season is a little bit more serious, there’s a little bit more tension. And also, it’s a little darker. I think in the first season, there were lighter themes or lighter moods – there are still some lighter scenes, but in general, the music grew up a little bit, so to speak. It became a little bit more serious. And it was nice to revisit a lot of the themes that I’d created for the first season and adapt them, evolve them, let them grow up together with the series.

The one thing I noticed is that in the first season, I used the theme of the Professor – the main theme – a lot of times during the soundtrack, and I remember now when I listen to the soundtrack [of season 2] that there was less room for that. I tried to implement the theme, but it didn’t work with the images, it was mostly too much – which is not a bad thing, I think. It’s just something that happened.

Even though the professor can be quite serious and stiff, on the other hand, we have these more comical images, where he starts hallucinating, or the scenes with his mom and her little dog Kafka. How did you manage to marry the two styles and come up with such a harmonious soundtrack?

I don’t know how, but it felt mostly natural like in every project in that the images are dictating what you need to make and because the series switches between those light comical moments and then in the next scene you see the murder scene. But I think what glues it together is the instrumentation and the style of music. It has that retro feel but also those jazz elements in there and then the strings and the woodwinds which you can use in both atmospheres, in both moods.

And it works really well with the Italian songs selected for the movie.

Definitely. That has nothing to do with me, obviously, but indeed with those Italian songs, you also have that fabric of that retro-jazzy feel. I love those songs. It’s a nice era. I wasn’t born then but my love for that kind of music I think comes through the music.

STILL FROM NOISE

Another project of yours which was released recently on Netflix, is the psychological thriller Noise. You have a bit in common with the main character, Matthias. He’s also a new dad.

Exactly. It was funny because when I started working on the movie, my daughter was, I think, not even two months old. So, sometimes it felt like Inception because I was working on a scene where there were baby cries and then I also heard them in another place, farther away. And then I was like, ‘Is it in the movie or not?’ [laughing] Then I placed pause, and, ‘Oh, no. it’s the real one.’.  It was immersive. So yeah, I felt indeed a lot of connection with him and a lot of times in the movie, I thought, ‘Yeah, I get you.’. Luckily for me, I didn’t lose my mind. [laughing] Or not up to the point that Mattias did. But yeah, that was a special thing to experience that me and Matthias were in the same phase in our lives so that was funny.

Was there a brief or did you have more freedom to play around?

There was quite some freedom involved. The director [Steffen Geypens] had some temps in the movie and we talked a little bit about the music, but it was more like, ‘You have to try to find the right music for the project.’. But you only see it when you put it under the images, and [either] it works or not.

It was a difficult one to start because finding the right tone and the right moods was in the beginning pretty hard. It needed to be subtle but not too subtle. Hints of the horror, but not too much. It was maybe also because of the sleep I didn’t have at the time so that didn’t help as well. But when we found the right direction, we were on the train and then it went better and better and easier like that.

STILL FROM NOISE

Did you start working directly after seeing the picture or did you start with the script?

For this project, it was after I saw the locked cut or one or two of the latest versions of the edit. It was not based on the scripts. Obviously, I did read the script, but I didn’t start before I saw the images. So, I read a script and I visited the set just to get the atmosphere.

I can hear some extended techniques in the soundtrack. Can you tell me more about that?

One of the things that I thought was fitting for the movie was to have a pretty small section so you could hear the separate musicians. So, we only had a group of 12 string players. And also, an idea for what I wanted to use is indeed extended techniques because we didn’t want a sound that was too clean and too polished. So, I worked a lot with quarter-tone bands or different bands where you have an uneasy tone. But also, a lot of cluster things [that create] tension, where some players do tremolo, others do thrills and then you combine those in a nice-sounding cluster chord. I also asked the soloists to play a little bit sul tasto and sometimes sul ponticello. The idea was to not have the perfect sound.

And that helps the mystery of the movie and the music.

And also, because of those techniques, it was the first time that I conducted the orchestra which was pretty nerve-wracking. In the beginning, I felt not really comfortable because I hadn’t been doing it, but pretty soon I became comfortable enough and I wanted to be there because of all those techniques so that I could explain to the musicians [what to do]. So, it was a really nice experience for me. I felt really connected with the musicians. Otherwise, you’re in the booth. It’s something different to be in front of the musicians directly.

While working on Noise, did you discover any interesting sounds or techniques that you’d like to reuse in the future?

 Yeah, I think all of them. Definitely the mysterious ones like the sul ponticello but also the quarter tone bands or the halftone bands. It’s really effective.

Also, I’ve used an instrument called a halldorophone. I was aware of the instruments because Hildur [Guðnadóttir] used it for Joker and Chernobyl, but I didn’t pay attention to it enough. I think I just love those soundtracks. But then when I started working on Noise, there was a guy who emailed me [and said], ‘I play the halldorophone. These are some examples. If you ever need something like this you can always contact me.’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect for this movie!’. So that’s also something I really want to use more in the future because it has so much character, it’s something you haven’t heard before – well, you have, but it’s not like it’s a clarinet or something – so it has a lot of atmosphere.

Is it versatile as an instrument?

Yeah, it’s versatile but it’s also really difficult because every take is different. You cannot recreate the same thing because it uses overtones and feedback. Which is interesting, but you better record it, otherwise… But yeah, you can do so much with it. But you need two persons to control it. The two musicians, Konstantinos Chinis and Ilias Pantelias, they live in Greece. I haven’t met them, so they recorded it at home, and we went back and forth. I didn’t have the pleasure to witness it in person, so hopefully, in the future, I will.

There are a couple of moments in the film where the cues are quite different in style from one another but the way they transition from one to the other into the next scene is seamless; the music travels with the story and the characters uninterrupted. How did you manage to create such a smooth transition?

Good question. We were always aware to make the music subtle enough. That was the key thing that the director wanted, to not make it too obvious. It’s mostly there in the background and gives a flavour to the scenes. I guess that’s maybe one of the tricks.

HANNES DE MAEYER AT WSA 2020. ©JEROEN WILLEMS

How was your collaboration with the director? Did you learn anything new while working with him?

It was a really nice collaboration. The funny thing is I already knew him for a lot of years and lately he did a lot of post-production supervision on a lot of the projects I did. So, I hadn’t worked with him as a director so it was nice to work with that hat.

I hadn’t done that sort of movie before, so it was really interesting to hear him teach me a bit about the genre and the music that he wanted. That was something I will take with me for the future.

Do you have any interesting projects coming up?

Yeah, definitely. It’s going to be a really fun year this year. Right now, I’m starting on a Dutch series. It’s called The Jewish Council and it’s a World War II movie about the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. It’s like a council that was created. The Germans wanted to collaborate with them, so they did that to prevent the worst from happening, but in the end, they have to choose in the Jewish community who is disposable and who is not. It’s a pretty strong theme. It’s a lot of emotions. And the crazy thing is that it really happened. That’s going to be a really interesting project. Also, music-wise, I think you can add a lot to that. It’s like five episodes.

And then the third season of Professor T which I’m also looking forward to. I’m really happy that there’s a third season so that’s amazing.

And also, a really exciting project for Channel 4 and Starz in the UK, it’s called The Couple Next Door. It’s a thrillerish series starring Sam Heughan from Outlander and Eleanor [Tomlinson] from Poldark. I’m really excited for that one. It’s going to be lots of fun.

Swedish composer duo Jon Ekstrand and Carl-Johan Sevedag have collaborated successfully together on several films and series over the years, including Borg vs. McEnroe, Horizon Line, Alex, and Top Dog.

The composers admitted having felt a special connection ever since their first collaboration and feeling very comfortable with one another. When the two of them are involved in a project, there is no room for egos. Their workflow is smooth, they complement each other in a really good way, have fun, and manage their stress levels better even when deadlines are tight.

One such example is Opponent, Milad Alami´s new feature film, for which they’ve only had three weeks to produce a score. The film is an intense psychological drama dealing with masculinity, intimacy, and violence, and the composers have done a great job of supporting the story.

Stella: Let’s chat about your newest project, Opponent. How did you get to work on this film?

Jon: We got contacted quite late in the process because they had already a composer on and unfortunately as it can be on some projects that didn’t work out. When we got approached, we had very little time, but I think both me and Carl-Johan felt that it was a really interesting project. We talked to Milad [Alami], the director, and we basically asked to see the movie without any temp music or what was done before. And we both kind of quickly saw what we wanted to do with it, and we told him that we had a lot of ideas. I think that made him really excited. So, we started directly almost after seeing the movie for the first time.

Carl-Johan: Yeah, we kind of had to. We had three weeks, I think, before the mixing final mix deadline. It was a short notice.

Jon: Yeah, we had to be patient. [laughing]

Carl-Johan: Yeah, super patient.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: Did Milad give you any instructions or did he just let you guys do what you thought worked best?

Carl-Johan: Milad, pretty much from the get-go, was very open-minded. And instead of giving us a brief he kind of just wanted us to try some stuff out and present to him our vision for the general theme and soundscape of the movie. And luckily for us, he had landed very well. [laughs] He liked our vision.

Stella: Did you score directly to picture?

Jon: Directly to picture. We saw the movie, we called Milad, talked to him for half an hour or something, and then we just said, ‘Okay, where do we go?’.

Carl-Johan: But that’s the nice part of coming in so late into a project because usually the picture’s locked. You can just put your stamp on straightaway. Not so much back and forth.

Jon: The good thing about being two [composers] is also that you can make decisions throughout the process, you can work really fast instead of sitting and doubting for a day over a cue. It’s like, ‘is this right or not?’. Here, it’s so instant that you can tell, ‘No, this is not working.’ or ‘Okay, perfect. Let’s do something else.’.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: It must have helped that you guys had collaborated before. You know each other’s pace and way of working.

Carl-Johan: For sure.

Jon: Yeah, I think we have a worked-in routine of how to work with each other. And especially on this project, we were here in my studio, and we basically just decided we shouldn’t bring in any other musicians and play all the instruments ourselves to make it also as quick as possible. Which was funny because we can play a lot of instruments but we’re not that good on playing them.

Carl-Johan: [laughing] Especially not these ones.

Jon: [laughing] Exactly. Especially not these ones we chose. We saw quite quickly that it actually added something to the feeling of the score, that there is a little bit of vulnerability when they’re not that super well-played some of the instruments. I think we really liked when we found that out and felt it when we saw the picture. It was great fun doing it that way also because it becomes so direct.

Stella: It’s raw.

Carl-Johan: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, exactly – raw. And I really appreciate that.

Stella: I feel that it mirrors the main character’s indecisiveness and internal turmoil as well.

Jon and Carl-Johan: Exactly.

CARL-JOHAN SEVEDAG

Stella: What inspired you to select all these instruments and create such a unique combination?

Carl-Johan: We wanted to capture this Scandinavian feel. For example, with the nyckelharpa – the key fiddle. As soon as you play a note on that it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re up North.’. [laughing]

Jon: [laughing] Yeah.

Carl-Johan: And then we also had the Iranian ney flute.

Jon: We also had duduks and the Japanese shakuhachi which is a primitive flute in the way of playing. It’s really hard to get into if you’re not a master on playing it – which we’re not. And there was clarinet. Basically, we took all the instruments that we thought could really be interesting for the sound. I have a lot of instruments in my studio and Carl-Johan in his so we kind of collected everything together and went from there.

Stella: Was the idea to capture a bit of Iman’s world back home and a bit of his current life and situation?

Jon and Carl-Johan: Exactly.

Jon: I wouldn’t say it’s an Ethno score, but there’s a small fragrance of it in some cues.

JON EKSTRAND

Stella: What did your process look like daily? And how did you guys manage to pull this off so fast?

Carl-Johan: Did we say that we were trying to do five minutes of music a day to be able to pull it off?

Jon: Yeah, I think it was five or six minutes. We went to the studio, did six minutes and then we left. Or on some days we did more because we had a flow. But it was really meeting at my studio at 9 o’clock, and leaving when we felt we were done.

Carl-Johan: I think we started focusing on the fighting scenes first, as we felt that that was the trickiest to pull off.

Jon: When you see the movie, the wrestling scenes, in a way, they’re action-wrestling scenes, but they’re not really, and you can’t really do what you would do, maybe, in a normal sports movie. I think we’ve quite quickly understood that this probably was the hardest one to nail down because we didn’t want to go for the kind of heroic, macho stereotype, because it’s not that kind of movie, you know?

“I think it’s a luxury in this day and age to work on a movie where you’re not forced to put music in every scene, but you actually let the movie breathe a little bit by itself […].”

Carl-Johan: But also, since we did five, six minutes every day, once we came in the next day, we’d kind of marinated overnight in what we had done, and then maybe we had a bit of a better idea of what needed to be done the next day. I like that type of workflow. It’s very efficient and is very inspiring also.

Stella: Only the key scenes are scored and everything else is silent. Was it you or the director who made that creative decision?

Jon: It was both, actually. That I think helps the authenticity of it and really makes it a little bit more real and more like a documentary instead of underscoring everything and all the dialogue and putting everything in a package. And also, in this way, when the music comes, it means something instead of just following everything. It underlines a much heavier mood and feeling.

Carl-Johan: I think it’s a luxury in this day and age to work on a movie where you’re not forced to put music in every scene, but you actually let the movie breathe a little bit by itself and you let the audience land a bit in the scenery and in the scenes that actually need music instead of forcing music upon the audience all the time.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: Did you guys disagree on things during this process – either between each other or with the director – or were you all on the same page all the time?

Jon: We were on the same page; I don’t know if it was because everybody knew it was just three weeks that we had, but yeah, everybody was surprisingly on the same thing. I think the producers, when they heard some of the key harp, they were like, ‘Maybe a little bit less of the key harp…’, because they thought it was just noise. [laughing] But Milad was loving the noise.

Carl-Johan: I don’t know if they did anything in the mix that we aren’t aware of, but it sounds good to me.

Jon: Yeah, me too.

Stella: During this process, have you discovered any new techniques or new sounds that made you think, ‘Ah, I love this! I’m going to use this again.’?

Carl-Johan: I really like the bass drum. It’s pretty much the same bass throughout the whole movie. I don’t remember exactly how we made it…

Jon: That’s the 808 Module, but it was through the Moog analog bucket-brigade delay. I really like that sound too.

Carl-Johan: That one I want to use. On every score.

Jon: And I like the flutes of the Mellotron that are irregular and really random, especially during the fight scenes. That was a sound that I really like and want to use more.

Carl-Johan: Yeah, it was an eye-opening experience when we realized that we could put an arpeggio on the Mellotron and get this.

Stella: If you had more time, what would you have done differently? If anything.

Carl-Johan: If we knew from the beginning, maybe we would have started thinking about taking in real instrumentalists.

Jon: Yeah, maybe. Or like an ensemble or something. I don’t know if that would have been the best way. It’s funny to think about but maybe we would’ve done a more overthought score, and maybe not that good and direct. Because now, when I listen back to it, I feel like there is something of the instant connection, there is no fussing around and trying to make it beautiful, or pretty, or anything like that. And maybe we would have killed that with more time, we would’ve made it more of a clean package. I don’t know. It’s hard to know.

Stella: There’s a school of thought that says having a deadline is freeing because it can be a torture to have all the time in the world as it will never feel good enough.

Jon: Totally. I don’t think I can write music for myself without deadlines. I need deadlines to actually finish projects. Otherwise, I would just sit and experiment all day just doing nonsense music.

Carl-Johan: I think the best stuff from what we’ve done together it’s been with the short deadlines. That’s when we’re just banging up. [laughing]

Jon: [laughing] Yeah.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: There are two main predominant themes in the movie – the topic of refugees and that of repressed homosexuality. What are your thoughts on these matters, considering they’ve been hot topics over the past few years?

Jon: I think we both felt really strong about it because I think these are really important things that we’re talking about here. And for me, these are the movies I want to make. I want to do movies that mean something. I have done a lot of other movies, but those I would consider more like work. And doing the other films is actually helping me to do these films because then you can relax a little bit economically because usually for things like this, there aren’t that big budgets. As soon as we got pitched the synopsis by Milad, we basically said, ‘OK, this sounds really interesting. We want to see the movie.’. After that, we kind of looked at each other and said, directly, ‘Of course we’re going to do this; it’s important.’.

And what I think is really interesting also is how much more important the actual story has become since we finished the movie because then the new revolution in Iran with the women made it much, much more important. I think the ending in the movie also means a lot more in a way for the audience because now the audience understands what a big decision he actually makes in the end.

Stella: Do you have any exciting projects coming out?

Jon: Daniel Espinosa, who I’ve been working with a lot, has done a European feature film, very much independent compared to the other movies that we’ve done lately together. And that has been great fun. It’s called Madame Luna. We’re heading into final mix. Mid-April or something like that. I think they’re really hoping for getting it out on the festival circuit. It’s a very powerful and very beautiful film in many ways.

Stella: Can you share anything about the music you wrote for it?

Jon: I actually got a little bit inspired from Opponent. My instrument that I learned as a kid was the clarinet but I played it from when I was seven till maybe 12; I was never really good at it. But on Opponent we used it on a couple of cues and it works so well. So on Daniel’s movie, basically, it’s just me playing the clarinet on the whole score and a little bit synths, but I would say that the main instrument is clarinet.

Carl-Johan: I’m doing Bartosz M. Kowaltski‘a next film. I’m going to start working on it at the end of the summer. Can’t say too much about it quite yet. But it’s going to be cool.

This week, we sat down with the renowned Belgian composer Michelino Bisceglia to discuss his latest project, the soundtrack for ‘My Sailor, My Love, a powerful tale of a second chance at love and the power of redemption, directed by Golden Globe-nominated director Klaus Härö.

We had a look at some of the finer details that make a composer-director collaboration successful, the three main components that inspire Michelino when he is putting together a musical mood board for a film, as well as some of his past and upcoming projects.

Bisceglia has won several awards for his work in film music, including the World Soundtrack Award Public Choice in 2014 for his work on the film ‘Marina’ and a nomination for a World Soundtrack Award in 2022 for his soundtrack on the animation drama ‘Charlotte’, which starred Keira Knightly. Recently Bisceglia received another nomination, this time for “Breakthrough Composer of the Year” by the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA).

Let’s chat about your newest release, ‘My Sailor, My Love’. How did you get to work on this film?

The score had to be by a Belgian composer because it was a co-production with Belgium. Klaus Härö, the director, knew a friend of mine, John Engel, who is an American producer based here in Brussels. I think John mentioned my name to Klaus. Klaus then did some research. We have in Belgium a site called Belgian Screen Composers Guild but there are like 64 names on the site, and Klaus told me that he scrolled through all the names because he was looking for a specific profile of a composer.

Finally, I received a call from Klaus and the co-producer and asking me if I was interested to have a talk with the director. I said, ‘yeah, of course’ and then we took time to talk together. It was a great first contact which is also the most important. He sent me over the script, and I loved the script. I was travelling at the time, I was doing some scoring abroad, taking flights and reading the script in the check-in halls. Klaus said, ‘Michel, if you have an idea to try something out, to create something, some theme, or a motif, or whatever that you can present to me that would be great.’

STILL FROM ‘MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’

When I was reading the script, I thought it was a beautiful story between these two elderly people but it’s the sea that is the fundamental element in this whole story. And that really inspired me, and I started to hear the music – which I do very often in the sense that when I read a script, I feel what it means musically. I sat down and started to compose two themes. I sent them over and then Klaus contacted me and said he liked them very much and he wanted me for the job.

Did the director give you any instructions whatsoever or did you have complete freedom to come up with something?

In the beginning, he didn’t know. He just gave me the script and he was like, “just read it. Let me know if you like it”. Later on, he even came over to my place. We had a lot of conversations; we really took the time to talk. Not only about how the music should be but about how we’re going to work together. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We are two strangers working intensively together on a project for a specific period of time. But this conversation we had was very fruitful. It was important to set out a base so that we gain some trust and know each other. And we also talked about other stuff, which has nothing to do with the project, just about life, you know? Two strange people, meeting each other and discovering our interests, our taste, our approaches, our way of working.

How much of the score had you written before you saw any shots?

Maybe like 12-13 cues were written before I even saw something. Of course, later I adapted to what it had to be. But we had this very special way of working because Klaus pointed out when we were talking that, ‘Michel, I do not have that much experience with big orchestra productions.’ He didn’t know how to approach that in our collaboration. But me neither. I didn’t know how to. I even said to him the most important words: ‘Listen, you have to give me this opportunity to make mistakes because for me, it’s important to go find the borders – until where can I go?’ If you have a friend and you ask him, ‘please let me make a mistake’, it means you’re asking, ‘please give me some trust, and I need to trust you also.’ It’s in two directions. I think it’s very important. And he understood that right away.

I was kind of creating a mood board, like a basket of music ideas that can be used within the process of editing where I can try some stuff out. And that’s what ended up happening at the end; after the editing process I started to compose additional music.

MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’ SCORING SESSION

‘My Sailor, My Love’ was shot at the same time and on the same island as ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’, but at the 10th of the budget. Has the budget affected at all the musical side? Would you have done things differently?

Well, every €1,000 I will have more, I will spend it on more strings. You will always go to the maximum I would say, but no, I think I could do what I wanted to do and I’m happy with what was available. Sometimes you have no budget, and you still have to be very creative. Of course, it will have an implication on the music. You will have a smaller orchestra, you will have less time to record, etc. But it was clear that there had to be orchestra music so you are speaking about a minimum budget, otherwise, you would never have an orchestra. And that was from day one clear also from his side for Klaus. And that’s also my profile as a composer. I do also some of the electronics, of course, we all get involved in that, but I’m trying to express myself more and I have more fun and joy and challenge working with the orchestra. And that’s maybe the reason why he ended up working with me.

It sounds like the orchestra was the best way to convey the emotions in the movie.

Yes. You know, the sea…it’s a big thing. But the sea can be big, the sea can be small, it can have all kinds of shapes, and that’s what the orchestra also has. It can have big moments, but it can be very intimate. It can be very small. It can be very lovely. It can be very imposing. Although we stayed away from the heaviness. I try to be sentient.

You mentioned you wrote about 12 cues just off the script. But once you saw the images of the landscapes and the people, did that change your musical direction at all?

No. You know what Klaus did? He sent me photos of the location, the sea, and the road where the car drives. So he ‘fed’ me with elements and the script was so clear. Everything was there. On some cues, we did minor changes. And of course, we had to record them, to orchestrate them, but we were very much on the right direction from the first note, which was wonderful. And it was great to have discovered that.

KLAUS HÄRÖ, MICHELINO BISCEGLIA, AND PATRICK LEMMENS AT ‘MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’ SCORING SESSION

It sounds like a healthy and fruitful collaboration.

Yeah, good communication. He directed and steered me in the right direction: which elements were important for him, where to be emotional but not too much, not to drag the emotion. It’s important to have it under control and I think when emotion is well-weighted, it has much more impact than when it’s completely out of control. I think it won’t work and it won’t be credible anymore.

What was the most difficult scene or cue to score?

Well, there was one cue that was the most difficult, but at the end he didn’t use it. [laughs] That was the moment after the little stress Annie and Howard had together when she gets back to Howard’s house and starts to work. He’s mowing the grass and there is a little game: she’s hiding behind the window and he’s crossing and they’re trying to see each other. I had music on that cue. And I was convinced that it could have been supported greatly with music, but we couldn’t find the colour that Klaus was convinced should be used. But he thought it would work without music also. And it works like that. After many tries, at the end, the decision was to do it without the music and I’m absolutely fine with that. And that is also interesting from my side as a composer to try to give you solutions. It’s better to choose from something that you have in your hands, something concrete, than to choose based on something abstract in your mind.

True. But silence can be just as important in a critical model.

Absolutely. And you don’t miss it. If you look at that, it works great. It’s a great play. For me, it was like a dance between Howard and Annie. But it works. It’s without music but it’s still a dance.

Did you find the characters relatable at all?

Yes, I did. Although it’s a story that starts from another story. So, it took time to get into them. But that part in the script was very well written. By reading it, you could really start to sense how they were, what the personalities were, and they were very inspiring also. People at that age are fragile, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. Klaus was not trying to find elements but handle with care, very delicate.

You mentioned earlier that your biggest inspiration for the film was the sea. What does usually inspire you musically?

People, their character in the first place. What is the personality? Is it soft? Is it with secrets? Is it with strong character? Soft character? Is it the way they talk? The location is also very inspiring. Where is it played? That’s something that I try to catch also in film music because it sets out the environment where the music behaves. It also makes you as a listener or as a viewer get really into the film, on the location itself. Also, the timeline sometimes can be very inspiring. I remember I did a Netflix series some years ago and it [was set in] the 18th century. And it’s very inspiring because it’s a different setting and you have to try to find a sound that matches with that period, but not be old fashioned, not be grabbed too early with the instrument of that period. Because that wouldn’t work. So, I would say those three elements are, for me, where I try to catch my colours, and try to use that as a base.

What is your ideal process? Do you like to score from the beginning to the end or start with larger cues? Or start with the theme, and then develop it?

I don’t have a strict structure to work on, but I would say the queues that are speaking to me the most, where I’ve had an idea immediately, I would definitely start on those. The bigger queues, the longer queues, the queues which will have most of work. Although sometimes you can be wrong; some smaller cues can be very difficult to nail. But usually, I would start on the cues that appease me directly, where I get like a crush on in terms of ideas. I do write without any markup, just on the piano or paper and piano. I try to write my own mood board where this theme could be for this character. Then I write a couple of themes for that period, some couple of themes for that location, some themes for that situation. So have like many colours that I can play with. I’m creating the puzzle [pieces] so I can make the puzzle later on. I always start in the middle somewhere.

One of my favourite projects of yours is ‘Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience’. It also has a cinematic sound; it tells a story and guides you through the exhibition. How different was it to write music for that project as opposed to writing for a film?

It was difficult. It was strange because you don’t have a film. And the producer sent me I don’t remember how many paintings I had to work on. And he sent me the script of how the painting will evolve from one painting to the other one and how it will be set in the room in the exhibition. And that’s it. So, I remember I had Monet’s painting of London with the Thames. And I was trying to look in the painting trying to see something move but nothing moves, of course, it’s just a static painting. [laughs] Although, when you stare at it and you take your time, you kind of imagine it moving. But then also I tried to see, if this was film, what would it be? This is the location, it’s London. We see the Thames and the water is moving, so we have to make it move. And it’s British, so I need some British elements. I tried to invent from myself elements where I could come up with music that is horizontal on a timeframe of 5 minutes.

Another thing that was difficult was that I had to compose that in a very short time. I think this whole project has been scored in two months. I was really running out of time, and I had to really sit down and write. And in this case, again, there’s no film, so the music had to say it all. The development of harmonies and themes was much more complex because it’s only the music that speaks out. You couldn’t hang on one course for some time because it doesn’t work, there’s nothing happening. The music has to move, forward, forward, forward. That was difficult. But yeah, I’m very happy with the result and the exhibition is a huge success.

What would you say is the project you’re most proud of so far?

I love them all. They’re absolutely my babies. [laughs] I don’t want to choose. It’s like when you have three children: which one do you love most? Difficult to say, right? For me, when working on a project I try to go emotionally very far into it. I go to sleep with it, I stand up with it, I have those characters in my mind. It’s like I’m isolated within that. And sometimes I meet the actors at the festival. And I reach out to them, “Hey, how are you doing?” And they’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ [laughs] They don’t know me, but I’ve seen them for two months on my screen.

I’ve really enjoyed working on ‘My Sailor, My Love’. I’ve also loved working on ‘Charlotte’, this animation film where Keira Knightley played the voice for this Canadian-British animation film. That was a very emotional film because it’s a very strong story of a girl that just wanted to be an artist and ended up being stuck within the World War with the Nazis and they’re fighting. And at the end ended up being killed to this horrible situation. She was 26 years old. It really struck me.

Another film which I loved working very much on was ‘Marina’. It was awarded by the World Soundtrack Awards, where it won the Public Choice Award in 2014. It’s a young singer-artist character that wanted to be an artist then the father tried to block him and convince him to do other things. It’s emotional, it’s heartbreaking. Just let him go. Let him do it. Go for your dreams, make your dream come true. Which we all want to have in our life, you know?

And ‘Monet’ also. I’m honoured to have been asked to write score music for such an incredible big artist, which has such a big place in history. It’s wonderful.

Do you have any future projects that you’re excited about?

Yes. Now I’m working on a film called ‘Sleep’, from a Dutch director, Jan-Willem Van Ewijk. It’s an American-Dutch road movie. It’s also a heavy drama. It’s a story surrounded by this weapon abuse where innocent people die in the States due to this insane availability of weapons within the society and it’s just crazy. It’s a road movie so the music also evolves within the film, it travels with the character and the location. For that project I already started to compose music ahead. The director wanted to have it also on the set, which is great. And now they are in the editing phase and I think it’s going to be in August that I’m going to be on it to finalize the score. I really look forward to that. I’ve seen already some rushes and it looks great. It’s fantastic.

Will you be using the full orchestra once again?

No, it’s going to be smaller. There will be some string orchestra covering it, but you won’t feel it. And there is some jazz flavor in it because, after the conversation I had with the director, we tried to get this American society where you also feel it in the music and jazz is an important element of the American culture. But, of course, it’s not the exposed jazz. It’s sensible. Very, very delicate, but it’s there. I’m very much looking forward to it.

Join Stephen Fry, the legendary comedian, actor, presenter, writer, and masterful storyteller, for a captivating evening in, as he celebrates the launch of his new book, Troy.

After enchanting readers with his formidable ‘Mythos’ and ‘Heroes’, Stephen Fry returns to complete this epic trilogy with yet another grand narrative from Ancient Greece, this time exploring the passionate and powerful story of Troy. Curl up on your sofa with a hot cuppa as Stephen brings to life the legendary kidnapping of the beautiful Helen, for whom the Greeks launched a thousand ships and lay siege for ten bloody years; the king of the gods, Zeus, who triggered war when he asked Trojan prince Paris to judge the fairest goddess of all; and the terrible, brutal war with casualties on all sides. Find out how these human passions of heroism and hatred, revenge and regret, and desire and despair still speak to us today.

TROY: OUR GREATEST STORY RETOLD – STEPHEN FRY’S GREEK MYTHS

Organized by Fane Online and Penguin Live, ‘A Night In with Stephen Fry’ will be broadcast on 30 November at 6:30 UK time and will be available to view up to a week after the event has ended and can be accessed Worldwide.

Don’t miss this one-off opportunity to join one of Britain’s best-loved authors as he invites us to join him at the fireside to hear the greatest story ever told.

Follow this link to register for this one of a kind event.

The ‘book and live stream’ package includes a unique ticket for the live stream, and a copy of Troy, worth £20, deliverable to any UK, Australia & New Zealand or rest of the world address. The first 1000 book and live stream packages in the UK will be signed.

On Saturday, 7 November 2020, at 8 PM GMT/3 PM EST, The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC) will welcome Academy and GRAMMY Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino to discuss his first solo LP, ‘Travelogue: Volume 1’, featuring his Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra.

Giacchino will be joined in conversation by Tim Simonec, who arranged the string parts for the album, along with members of his Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra including Mark Gasbarro, Dan Greco, Abe Laboriel, Abe Laboriel Jr, Gayle Levant, and Andrew Synowiec, as well as mixing engineer Warren Brown.

The concept album, which was released on 30 October 2020 on Mondo Records, was recorded during the pandemic and saw Giacchino reunite with a few of his long-time collaborators. The record features spoken-word interludes voiced by actress Janina Gavanka and ‘follows a space traveller seeking solace on a planet that isn’t as broken and lost as her own distant world. Upon discovering earth, the story unfolds throughout its 11 captivating tracks.’

©MONDO

Michael Giacchino’s credits include some of the most popular and acclaimed film projects in recent history, including ‘The Incredibles’, ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’, ‘Ratatouille’, ‘Star Trek’, ‘Jurassic World’, ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’, ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ and ‘Coco’. Giacchino’s 2009 score for the Pixar hit ‘Up’ earned him an Oscar®, a Golden Globe®, the BAFTA, the Broadcast Film Critics’ Choice Award and two GRAMMY® Awards.

Giacchino studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. After college, he landed a marketing job at Disney and began studies in music composition, first at Juilliard, and then at UCLA. He moved from marketing to producing in the newly formed Disney Interactive Division where he had the opportunity to write music for video games.

After moving to DreamWorks Interactive, he was asked to score the temp track for the video game adaptation of ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’. Subsequently, Steven Spielberg hired him as the composer and it became the first PlayStation game to have a live orchestral score, recorded with members of the Seattle Symphony. Giacchino went on to score numerous video games including Spielberg’s ‘Medal of Honor’ series. Giacchino’s work in video games sparked the interest of J.J. Abrams, and thus began their long-standing relationship that would lead to scores for the hit television series ‘Alias’ and ‘Lost’, and the feature films ‘Mission Impossible III’, ‘Star Trek’, ‘Super 8’ and ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’.

PHOTO BY DAN GOLDWASSER

Additional projects include collaborations with Disney Imagineering on music for Space Mountain, Star Tours (with John Williams), the Ratatouille ride in Disneyland Paris, and the Incredicoaster on Pixar Pier at California Adventure. Giacchino was the musical director of the 81st Annual Academy Awards®. His music can be heard in concert halls internationally with all three ‘Star Trek’ films, ‘Ratatouille’, ‘Jurassic World’, ‘Up’ and ‘Coco’ being performed live-to-picture with a full orchestra. In June 2018, Giacchino premiered his first work for symphony orchestra, Voyage. Commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, the piece celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of NASA. In July 2019, a third movement was added for the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing.

‘Jojo Rabbit’, the critically acclaimed Fox Searchlight film written and directed by Taika Waititi, earned Giacchino a BAFTA nomination this year. His upcoming film projects include Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman’.

Giacchino serves as the Governor of the Music Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the advisory board of Education Through Music Los Angeles.

The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts of Music Arranging, Composition and Orchestration within the entertainment industry community and the general public. To find out more about ASMAC or to become a member, visit www.asmac.org.

Tickets:

To register for the event, follow this link.

ASMAC Members – $5.00
SCL, Maestra, ASA, AWFC – $8.00
Non Members – $10.00

©MONDO

To purchase this gorgeous vinyl, visit mondoshop.com, or listen to the album on your music streaming service of choice.

On Saturday, 10 October 2020, The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC) hosted an online event as part of their Master Class Series, featuring a very special guest: the prolific Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated composer John Debney.

Moderated by composer, arranger, pianist and ASMAC board member, Sylvester Rivers, the master class was cleverly structured into five main topics:

•  Anatomy of a comedy score

•  Anatomy of a rom-com

•  Anatomy of a big action movie

•  How to get inside a director’s head

•  Surviving post-pandemic Hollywood

Famously charismatic and friendly, Debney began the master class with the cheerful statement, ‘Let’s have fun! Let’s have a look inside my crazy musical brain!’

JOHN DEBNEY

A musical chameleon, John Debney has composed music for over 100 films and shows in a variety of genres during his career that spans over three decades, including ‘The Passion of the Christ’, ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘The Princess Diaries’, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, ‘Sea Quest DSV’, ‘A Pup Named Scooby-Doo’, ‘Inspector Gadget’, and ‘The Ant Bully’, to name but a few.

For this class, the composer chose to analyse in detail three big genres: comedy, rom-com, and action. As such, Debney dissected a few of his memorable cues from films like ‘Liar Liar’, ‘Bruce Almighty’, ‘Isn’t It Romantic’, and ‘Iron Man 2’, providing aspiring film composers with advice on how to go about writing music for these genres and important aspects that need to be taken into consideration in each case.

Over the course of three and a half hours, the composer received a plethora of fantastic questions from ASMAC members and attendees alike, graciously answering each and every one of them and offering invaluable advice, as well as words of encouragement to aspiring film composers. He also elaborated on some of the challenges the industry is facing in the time of COVID-19 and how the musicians are adapting.

ASMAC Executive Board President, Gayle Levant, who is also Debney’s long-time friend and harpist on many of his films, joined the composer in reminiscing about their experience of working together. Among other things, she praised Debney for his professionalism, excellent conducting skills, and ability to keep calm in stressful situations.

JOHN DEBNEY PRESENTING DURING THE MASTER CLASS

There were two notable nuggets of wisdom the composer shared with the attendees that are perhaps the most important pieces of advice he has offered during the class. Firstly, Debney encouraged aspiring composers to ‘become the best composer you can become’ by learning all styles of music (even the ones they dislike), studying everything from how to write a melody, to counterpoint, orchestration, conducting and the ranges of each instrument, to work hard, be a good person, treat people well, and to always remain humble.

And secondly, following a question from an attendee regarding the toll that this profession can take on one’s mental health, Debney urged film composers to be disciplined, take care of themselves, make sure they have a great support system and not ‘take it so seriously that it will eat you alive’.

Needless to say, the hours flew by very quickly. The master class was a great opportunity for aspiring composers to get a sneak peek behind the curtain with one of the most successful composers in Hollywood and to learn a few tips and tricks on how to navigate this increasingly competitive landscape.

Now it is perhaps more important than ever to have access to such events, considering the exceptionally challenging times brought about by the pandemic. Not only do they provide attendees with invaluable and entertaining information, but they also help keep the community together and the conversation going on how industry professionals can adapt to the new normal.

To keep up to date with ASMAC future events, visit www.asmac.org, where you can also become a member, or follow their Eventbrite page.

On Saturday, 10 October 2020, at 12 PM PDT/8 PM BST, film music lovers and aspiring film composers alike will get a unique chance to attend an online masterclass with the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated composer John Debney. Organized by The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC), the event will be moderated by the ASMAC board member Sylvester Rivers.

Topics discussed during the event include:

•   Anatomy of a Comedy Score

•   Anatomy of a Rom Com

•   Anatomy of a Musical

•   How to get inside a director’s head

•   Surviving Post-Pandemic Hollywood

JOHN DEBNEY

John Debney is one of the most successful and versatile composers in Hollywood. During his prolific career that spans over three decades and more than 100 film scores, the composer has penned music in a variety of genres for films such as ‘The Passion of the Christ’, ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘The Jungle Book’, and ‘The Princess Diaries’, television projects such as ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Sea Quest DSV’, as well as numerous cartoons such as ‘A Pup Named Scooby-Doo’, ‘Inspector Gadget’, and ‘The Ant Bully’, to name but a few.

Beloved by collaborators and fans alike, Debney’s musical talent is only matched by his famed charismatic and affable disposition, which makes for one extra reason to join this not-to-be-missed event.

SYLVESTER RIVERS

Sylvester Rivers is a composer, arranger, pianist and ASMAC board member. He has recorded with numerous hit artists including Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, The Jacksons, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson, Kenny Rogers, New Edition, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Gladys Knight &The Pips, Martha Reeves, Lamont Dozier, Barry White, the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Shalamar, Cheryl Lynn, Gloria Gaynor, Candi Staton, The Sylvers, Marc Bolan & T. Rex, Ray Parker, Jr. & Raydio, Deniece Williams, Johnny Mathis, Billy Preston, Syreeta Wright, Michael Henderson, Earl Klugh, Stanley Turrentine, Najee, Maxine Nightingale, Aretha Franklin, The Fifth Dimension, and many others.

The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts of Music Arranging, Composition and Orchestration within the entertainment industry community and the general public. To find out more about ASMAC or to become a member, visit www.asmac.org.

Tickets:

To register for the event, follow this link.

ASMAC Members – $5.00
SCL, Maestra, ASA, AWFC – $8.00
Non Members – $12.00

The ‘60s brought changes in culture and style that affected even the world of film music. The sound of the symphonic score established in the ‘30s by the likes of Max Steiner was going out of fashion, being instead replaced by experimental music, jazz- and rock-oriented rhythms, and pop tunes. Composers like John Barry, Ennio Morricone and Jerry Goldsmith were strongly influencing the cinematic sound of the decade and what the studios would request from their directors.

The following selection includes some of the most famous rejected scores of the ‘60s, underlining the strong creative differences between directors, composers and studios, which ultimately influenced the outcome of each production.

‘EL CID’ MOVIE POSTER

El Cid (1961)

Miklós Rózsa
Mario Nascimbene

Directed by Anthony Mann and produced by Samuel Bronston, El Cid is a 1961 epic historical drama film that is based on the life of the Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who sets upon defending Christian Spain against the Moors.

Samuel Bronston had just finished his epic film King of Kings (1961), and decided to materialise his life-long dream of bringing the story of El Cid to the big screen. MGM had partially financed King of Kings, which meant they had a say in every major decision. Wanting more freedom and control over this new epic, Bronston produced El Cid with his own company, Samuel Bronston Productions, in association with the Italian company Dear Film Produzione. This meant that in order to receive financial assistance from the Italian government, certain compromises had to be made, such as Bronston having to employ a certain number of Italian artists and technicians to work on the project. As such, despite wanting to hire Miklós Rozsa, with whom he had worked on A King of Kings, Bronston went ahead and hired the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene. This collaboration, however, would be short-lived, as Bronston’s requirements would infuriate the composer. Nascimbene writes:

Bronston called me and asked me to score EL CID, which was being shot by Anthony Mann. I read the screenplay first, and they told me to write some dance themes only. The music had to accompany a kind of fighting dance for scenes taking place on the beach, so I wrote some cues for tympani, with a rather brutal, violent rhythm, without any real melody. Director Mann liked what I had written and shot his scenes, using the cues as background. Then, when shooting EL CID was about halfway, I was asked to come to Malaga to discuss the score itself. Samuel Bronston met me there when I arrived, showed me a pile of records of Massenet’s ‘El Cid’ and told me: “This is the music for the film”. Apparently I had to sort of “adapt” Massenet’s music for the film. Samuel Bronston behaved in an offensive way, and I told him that I am used to discussing the score with a director, and with him only. So I returned to Rome, where I tore up the contract already made.

This outcome worked wonderfully for Bronston, who managed to hire his first choice, Miklós Rózsa. It is speculated that the producer never intended for the score to be an adaptation of Jules Massenet’s opera to begin with, but it was merely a sure-fire plot to get Nascimbene to back out of the picture.

Be that as it may, Bronston did go to great lengths to get Rózsa to score his picture, even managing to get him out of a pre-existing contract with MGM to score Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Mutiny would end up being scored by another MGM in-house composer, Bronislau Kaper. As a concession to their co-producers, another Italian composer’s name (Carlo Savina) appeared on the credits as co-composer on the picture, but only on the Italian prints.

Bronston flew Rózsa and his family to Madrid for the whole summer and offered him a lovely house for him to work from and the same weekly living expenses the producer himself was getting. Besides Spain itself being a huge inspiration for the score of El Cid, the composer set out to research the history of El Cid and the Spanish music in the Medieval Ages. He turned to ninety-two-year-old Dr Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Spanish philologist, historian and expert in El Cid, who introduced him to the twelfth-century musical poems of ‘La Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Furthermore, Rózsa studied Felipe Pedrell’s collection of Spanish folksongs, which the musicologist had compiled throughout his life. The composer spent a month of intense study, analysing these two very different sources after which he began working on translating what he had learned into the new score.

Despite Rózsa’s seamless collaboration with Bronston, the composer was shocked to realize, during the premiere of El Cid, that the director and his sound editor had chopped and binned some of Rózsa’s cues in favour of the film’s sound design. As a result, Rózsa cancelled his publicity tour, stating that, ‘I could not talk about music which nobody was going to hear.’

The above issues notwithstanding, the film was a commercial success earning more than four times its production cost of $6.25 million and garnered three Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Film Score and Best Song. El Cid would be Milós Rózsa’s last epic score.

‘HATARI!’ MOVIE POSTER

Hatari! (1962)

Henry Mancini
Hoagy Carmichael

Hatari! is a 1962 American adventure romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks. It portrays a group of professional game catchers in Africa who entrap wild animals and sell them to zoos before a female wildlife photographer disrupts their ways.

Hawks was planning on hiring his long-time collaborator, Dmitri Tiomkin, to write the score for the picture. The director’s only requirement was for Tiomkin to completely leave out the string and woodwind sections and instead use authentic African instruments. Thinking Hawks was joking, the conservative composer showed the director a score that included strings. This misunderstanding would lead to them parting ways and the pair would never work together again.

HOAGY CARMICHAEL’S SKECTH FOR ‘HATARI!’

The director then turned to prolific singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael who played Cricket in the director’s 1944 picture, To Have and Have Not, after Hawks had discovered the musician at a party. Hawks wanted to work with someone who had never scored a picture before and had no preconceived notions of what a score is supposed to sound like. And although the director was happy at first with Carmichael’s material, they ended up disagreeing on the direction of the music and Hawks had to turn to another composer yet again.

As it turned out, the third time was the charm as the director’s next choice, Henry Mancini, would go on to score Hatari!. Mancini did end up using violins in his music, however, he masterfully entwined them with tribal rhythms and an array of native instruments that Hawks had brought back with him from Africa. Mancini would use instruments such as the thumb piano, shell gourds and giant pea pods to score the animal scenes. Among the shot material was a scene that Hawks was contemplating on cutting out, but asked Mancini to have a look at it regardless. The scene featured Anna Maria D’Alessandro (Elsa Martinelli) taking three small elephants to a watering hole to bathe them. The composer loved the scene and immediately knew what to do with it. He superimposed an E-flat clarinet over an electric calliope (the only one in the world at that time), and the result would give birth to one of cinema’s most memorable themes, ‘Baby Elephant Walk’. The composer recalled:

[…] As the little elephants went down to the water, there was a shot of them from behind. Their little backsides were definitely in rhythm with something. […] it reminded me of something. I though, Yeah, they’re walking eight to the bar, and that brought something to mind, an old Will Bradley boogie-woogie number called “Down the Road a Piece”, a hit record in the old days, with Ray McKinley on drums and Freddie Slack on piano. Those little elephants were definitely walking boogie-woogie, eight to the bar. I wrote “Baby Elephant Walk” as a result.

Interestingly, the next track after ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ on the soundtrack recording is ‘Just for Tonight’, which was Hoagy Carmichael’s reworking of ‘A Perfect Paris Night’ and the only material retained from his work in the film. Luckily, all of Carmichael’s recorded music, as well as the written score were preserved and are archived at Indiana University.

‘TORN CURTAIN’ MOVIE POSTER

Torn Curtain (1966)

John Addison
Bernard Herrmann

Torn Curtain is a 1966 Cold War political thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. …of an American scientist (Paul Newman) who is secretly a double agent who publicly defects to East Germany to discover Soviet nuclear secrets.

By that time, the celebrated director had enthralled audiences worldwide with masterpieces such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). However, following the box office failure of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock started to doubt himself as his cinema was beginning to show its age. Universal Studios saw Hitch’s hesitation as an opportunity to get their claws into the film’s post-production. Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, instructed Hitchcock to bring in a new sound to the picture and go for a pop-oriented score more in tune with the times.

Having previously successfully collaborated with Bernard Herrmann on eight of his pictures which constituted one of the greatest director-composer partnerships in the history of cinema, Hitchcock turned to the composer once again, this time with precise instructions in tune with the studio’s demands:

I am particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type music that we have been using for so long. […] The audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all of the European filmmakers where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience.

Herrmann was not crazy about the film but agreed to score it as by that time Hitchcock was his only regular source of feature film work. The independent-minded composer went ahead with music he thought was appropriate for the film. Granted, Hitchcock had asked Herrmann to sketch the music ‘in advance because we have an urgent problem of meeting a tax date’, so the composer had to come up with the cues blindly. When Hitchcock arrived at the Goldwyn Studios on 24 March 1966 for the first recording session, he was shocked to realize that Herrmann had gone against his wishes and wrote bold, unusual symphonic music using atypical orchestrations and an unorthodox line-up of instruments consisting of twelve flutes – doubling on piccolos, alto flutes and bass flutes – sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, double timpani, eight cellos and eight basses. He also composed music for the murder scene, even though Hitchcock had expressly requested be left without music.

The orchestra musicians were ecstatic about Herrmann’s score and gave him a standing ovation right after the recording. Hitchcock, however, was furious and dismissed the composer in front of everyone. The two never spoke again, ending a twelve-year-old collaboration.

A few days later, British composer John Addison was hired and flown to Los Angeles. Ironically, Addison’s replacement music wasn’t pop-oriented either and neither did it manage to salvage the picture which flopped.

Bernard Herrman’s score for Torn Curtain remains one of the best known ‘might have beens’ in the history of film music. And although it never ended up in the film, his music was released on CD no less than three times over the years.

‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’ MOVIE POSTER

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Classical compositions by various composers
Frank Cordell, Alex North

2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus and is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Kubrick worked together with Clarke on writing the script, which they completed in January 1966, which would eventually prompt Clarke to publish his science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As was his custom, Kubrick used temporary music throughout his film in order to find the film’s pulse and to help carry the narrative. And thus, over the next two years, as the project was taking shape, he acquired multiple records of classical music, listened to countless hours of orchestral pieces and put together a temp track (temporary music used in a picture during production). Among his favourites were Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (which became the movie’s signature track), a waltz by Frédéric Chopin, Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Aram Khachaturian’s Gayene, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Kubrick actually approached Orff and tried to persuade him to compose the score, however, Orff politely declined saying that this task was too large for his advanced age (the composer was seventy-one at the time).

Kubrick became convinced that his film didn’t need an original score as his carefully-curated selection of classical oeuvres would do the film justice. The MGM bosses, however, disagreed. They were adamant that a movie of such magnitude required an equally-great composer. And so, at the end of 1967, the director approached two composers – English composer Frank Cordell and well-established Hollywood composer Alex North (with whom Kubrick had worked on Spartacus (1960).

The collaboration with Cordell was stillborn, as at that time, Kubrick wasn’t very clear about what he wanted and instructed the composer to adapt Mahler’s Third Symphony. Cordell’s score got rejected and Kubrick then turned to Alex North.

Alex North recalls:

I was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where Arthur Clarke was living) and got a phone call from Kubrick from London asking me of my availability to come over and do a score for 2001. He told me that I was the film composer he most respected, and he looked forward to working together. I was ecstatic at the idea of working with Kubrick again (Spartacus was an extremely exciting experience for me), as I regard Kubrick as the most gifted of the younger-generation directors, and that goes for the older as well. And to do a film score where there were about twenty-five minutes of dialogue and no sound effects! What a dreamy assignment, after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, loaded with dialogue.

 I flew over to London for two days in early December to discuss music with Kubrick. He was direct and honest with me concerning his desire to retain some of the “temporary” music tracks which he had been using for the past years. I realized that he liked these tracks, but I couldn’t accept the idea of composing part of the score interpolated with other composers. I felt I could compose music that had the ingredients and essence of what Kubrick wanted and give it a consistency and homogeneity and contemporary feel. In any case, I returned to London December 24th [1967] to start work for recording on January 1, after having seen and discussed the first hour of film for scoring. Kubrick arranged a magnificent apartment for me on the Chelsea Embankment, and furnished me with all the things to make me happy: record player, tape machine, good records, etc. I worked day and night to meet the first recording date, but with the stress and strain, I came down with muscle spasms and back trouble. I had to go to the recording in an ambulance, and the man who helped me with the orchestration, Henry Brant, conducted while I was in the control room. Kubrick was present, in and out; he was pressured for time as well. He made very good suggestions, musically. I had written two sequences for the opening, and he was definitely favorable to one, which was my favorite as well. So I assumed all was going well, what with his participation and interest in the recording. But somehow I had the hunch that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss’ Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch. Also, how could I compete with Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, I thought I did pretty damned well in that respect.

In any case, after having composed and recorded over forty minutes of music in those two weeks, I waited around for the opportunity to look at the balance of the film, spot the music, etc. During that period I was rewriting some of the stuff that I was not completely satisfied with, and Kubrick even suggested over the phone certain changes that I could make in the subsequent recording. After eleven tense days of waiting to see more film in order to record in early February, I received word from Kubrick that no more score was necessary, that he was going to use breathing effects for the remainder of the film. It was all very strange, and I thought perhaps I would still be called upon to compose more music; I even suggested to Kubrick that I could do whatever necessary back in L.A. at the M-G-M studios. Nothing happened. I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the “temporary” tracks.

In an interesting twist, North found out that his score had been rejected only during the film’s premiere in New York, an experience that, according to author Michael Benson, left him ‘shocked and humiliated’.

Thankfully, Alex North’s original score was brought to life in 1993 via a full recording conducted by Jerry Goldsmith.